Issued by the Ministry of Education
Johannesburg 17 May 2000
Ladies and Gentlemen
My presence here tonight has meant that I had to forgo various Cabinet and parliamentary duties that normally take place on a Wednesday. However I was determined to be here because Sol Plaatje is a South African close to my heart.
Many of you might know that I am about to rename The Magister building, the Department's head office in Pretoria, Sol Plaatje House. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about that building, which once housed apartheid's Bantu Education, is it's new name. Its renaming that brings beauty where only ugliness reigned for so long, before 1994.
Sol Plaatje's name on that building is an important act of reclamation, like our own reclamation of the Springbok symbol, snatching it from Verwoerd so that it stood so memorably, in mid-1995, for our new ideals.
We do not have a fresh start, the luxury of turning the clock back in our country, as they did after the French Revolution, to Year One. We are plagued by legacy, by apartheid's numerous legacies, and none so awful as our educational inheritance, apartheid's mission of maiming minds.
What drives me as Minister is the idea of a day when normalcy returns. When schools become, as they are for so many children everywhere, safe homes for simple childhood. Places where young minds find adventure, mischief or boredom as may be their wont: places where childhood's petty preoccupations reign supreme rather than the adult matters of starvation, blighted prospects and invidious exclusion. What awful words these are, that ought to be out of place in a world where equity reigns.
What we seek then in Njabulo Ndebele's phrase, is the Rediscovery of the Ordinary. And it is paradoxically Sol Plaatje's ordinariness, the blessed ordinariness of an extraordinary man, that I want to focus on tonight. Clearly his life is a life festooned with grand deeds, many of which have been so wonderfully documented in the film that you have just seen, the gamut of public achievement and the accoutrements of Great Man status, his writing of the Diary of the Mafeking Seige, his pioneering journalism, his role as First secretary general of the ANC, his seminal work Native Life in South Africa, his classic novel Mhudi.....
But how did all that begin? Before all of that, Plaatje was a man with a pen and a thirst for knowledge. A famous theologian said once that all we humans have, all that is given to us, is time and the ability to think. The rest is silence and Plaatje avoided that fate, no silence closes around him because of the words he left and the deeds he did.
Sol Plaatje was a teacher for some time. He became a messenger in the telegraph office, then a court interpreter, fluent in Setswana, Xhosa, Zulu, English and Dutch, a journalist, a founder of newspapers in the Setswana he loved, and a frequent contributor to the English-language press. He translated the plays of Shakespeare into Setswana and collected anthologies of Setswana proverbs, working at times as a researcher for the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. He was the first black South African novelist.
Yet Sol Plaatje's formal education in a Lutheran mission school stopped before the end of the primary grades, but he was a lifelong learner before the term was coined, and he became a giant of South African letters and politics.
He was our century's first African Renaissance man. As a novelist, court translator, literary translator, sociological researcher and co founder of our country's party of government...not much more could be asked of anyone. And what I call his normalcy, on which I want to dwell is that he could devise and set about these assorted life projects with an assurance, a simple sense of purpose, that later events in this country would render remote from the reality of most blacks. His writing rang with easy assurance, even in anger he was unflappable, like:
"In the beginning of this Century I became a journalist, and when called upon to comment on things social, political or military, I always found inspiration in one of Shakespeare's sayings, for example, 'when beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes'"
That tone, Plaatje's tone, is the normalcy that we must rediscover. Verwoerd shook it; Bantu education trashed it. And we are rebuilding it now.
To illustrate what we have lost and what I mean that we are trying to rebuild, I want to quote from Anjie's Krog's brilliant book Country of My Skull, where Krog in turn quotes the testimony of Sheila Masote, who touches very directly on the normalcy that existed in her own life, and then was lost; ravaged by apartheid
"I was born into a happy family...my father and mother both teachers. They stayed in the best place-Orlando West where you'd find the elite, the Mandelas, the Masekelas, the Sisulus, the Mathews.. bear with me ...I cry a lot...sometimes it's anger...This was a beautiful place. My father was cultural man-he was the first Chairperson of the Johannesburg Bantu Music festival that brought forth eisteddfods, Dorkay house. All of this happened. My mother is a singer with a wonderful voice. I'm highly cultured.. I make no apologies, I am....I married a highly cultured man- the only man, the only black in Africa who holds a licentiate in violin teaching. He established the first black orchestra. I know what I'm talking about-but all this has crumbled. I had a family that was home and togetherness. That was destroyed. I couldn't realise any dream. As a young girl I lost role models, because at the time, in the sixties, that was when everybody left. The frequent imprisonment of my father destroyed us, the imprisonment of my father and later of myself and my husband. The communal living crumbled, because of the system and the Special Branch. My father and mother were dismissed as teachers. My brother went into exile. There was loneliness. My other brother turned into an alcoholic. He became violent. I saw my mother crying. she lost her energy......I used to go to for ballet with ribbons in my hair, the only daughter in a well off family. We read, we talked politics, I'm not saying this to brag but to tell you what cultured ,educated society existed in Orlando West. Then people were arrested and others went into exile.....this whole world crumbled.."
It was Plaatje who I used as an example when I addressed parliament last year on the occasion of World Literacy Day. I suggested to the National Assembly that an important aspect of power is language and how we make use of language. Literacy, of course, is the key tool for the use of language.
We know that every day, illiteracy keeps some people poor while literacy makes others rich. Sol Plaatje lived by the written word. He was the fiercely proud offspring of literate, independent peasant farmers in the Free State. His greatest grief was to see the thriving South African peasantry destroyed, dispossessed of their own land, crops and herds by the evil Land Acts of the new Union Government, condemned to wander the country as sharecroppers, migrant labourers, proletarians or domestic servants in the new mining and industrial towns.
Plaatje lived and died at the crucial intersection of South Africa's history, where a cowardly imperial government created an overtly racist constitution, and handed the reins of power to the forces of reaction and oppression. He experienced dispossession. He fought against it. He foretold the bleak future of repression and resistance through which generations more were condemned to pass until liberation day.
Sol Plaatjes' courage and determination against massive odds must be an inspiration to all of us who concerned with the development of education in South Africa. Regrettably there were many thousands of Plaatjes, men and women, from whom the blessings of education were withheld. And are still withheld, as we haul ourselves out of the morass, a century later.
Congratulations with the launch of this documentary. I wish you good luck for its success. I hope to see it spread widely though our schools and communities.
I thank you.